Introduction

The full accusations text can be downloaded here: The Accusations [pdf: 44kb]


The Sri Lankan government’s own figures indicate that out of the 429,059 Tamils living in theVanni at the start of the offensive in October 2008 only 282,380 remained by the time the government military operations concluded on May 19, 2009. An official UN report submitted by a panel appointed by the UN general secretary acknowledge that the final weeks of the Sri Lankan military operations have left an estimated 70,000 Tamil people unaccounted for. Although the precise number of casualties are still not known, there is no doubt that a substantial part, a part that is significant enough to have an effect on the group as a whole perished during the military operations on the Tamil administered Vanni in 2009.

It is clear that what happened during these few weeks in 2009 are not isolated acts of war crimes, but are part of a coordinated plan whose different components aim at the physical destruction in whole or in part of the Tamil people. Further, since the end of the war the entire Tamil region in the north and east has been heavily militarised to allow the implementation of major structural changes. This includes large scale land acquisition and state sponsored Sinhala colonisation, the destruction of Tamil cultural heritage and a coercive imposition of a Sinhala Buddhist identity on the region, forced transfers and control of the population and deprivation of livelihood. In order to allow the implementation of this process a permanent state of fear is maintained through daily abductions, rapes and killings, draconian surveillance and repression of freedom of expression.

This is the context in which we, as concerned non-Tamils, prepare this accusations document for the distinguished panel of judges to examine. Our submission is that in Sri Lanka we are confronted with an ongoing genocidal process against the Tamil people who inhabit the North and East of the island, who identify themselves as ‘Eelam Tamils’. It therefore falls upon the Tribunal not only to decide whether genocide has taken place and determine who the perpetrators are but also whether the genocidal process is still continuing. If the Tribunal decides that indeed the genocidal process is still continuing then the onus is on the panel of judges to recommend practical measures that can stop this process. For this reason we have divided his text into two parts, the first describing the accusations and the second dealing with issues concerning possible actions to stop the genocidal process.